American Latin

“Qui tacet consentire vidétur” is Latin and has become part of the philosophy and jurisprudence within the American legal system. It translates as ‘‘your silence is taken as your consent”.

It is sadly also becoming the accepted norm, the de facto mindset of those elected and of the electorate.

This nation is being pulled apart and set against each other by self serving opportunistic politicians. They are attempting to separate the basic components of the country founded as the great “melting pot”. False constituencies are being created to facilitate not the best interests of the country, but rather engineered solely to ensure the positions of power now not deserved by those who hold positions of authority within the United States government. We as a nation fundamentally agree on what we want as a people and for our children, optimally delineated within the preamble of the United States Constitution:

in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

Yet we are told by some in Congress that by attempting to undertake those precious aforementioned national goals, we will be irreparably harming an undefined portion of the population, and thus we should do nothing, as if inaction was a solution unto itself.

We are experiencing the result of our elected officials fiddling while our financial stability is burning. Any attempt to deal with the financial crisis is met with howls of discrimination, racism, and wanting to ultimately eliminate portions of the population by restricting their access to the basic fundamental necessities of life and liberty. We should have, must have, national discussions to fully test the viability of the options available to us as we move forward, but to use a type of balkanization is not the way the beacon of freedom around the world should present itself to the nations of the world.

How can we accept the statements from our elected officials that somehow a family in urban Chicago which wants something other than a better future for their children is somehow intrinsically different from a family’s’ aspirations in rural Montana. America is not a zero sum nation. We cannot claim that helping citizens in Miami will somehow come at the cost of the citizens in Maine. We are not a country of tribes, warring against each other for the spoils of war. We are a democratic republic and cannot allow people to whom we have entrusted the security and prosperity of the country to do little but protect their positions of power at the expense of the people.

There should not be a series of claimed minority groups when it comes to the nature of freedom: there is but one constituency in this country that needs to be served by the government.

We, the people.

“Qui tacet consentire vidétur” should not be the Latin phrase that guides this nation, but rather we should remember the Latin that best exemplifies the greatest nation the world has ever known, the nation that from many has come one.

“E Pluribus Unum”